Sunday, January 1 1995

The Scream series has always been about movies. But unlike most movies, the Scream movies have always been smarter than commentaries about it, and in particular, smarter than the commentaries about its commentaries on movies.

hy would anyone want to play a talking donkey? We might suppose that doing voices for an animated movie is less stressful than acting in live-action pictures, that actors are well-compensated, or that doing a movie 'kids can see' is appealing to many movie stars.

'Someone Like You''s press kit describes Eddie and Jane as a 'Hepburn and Tracy of the modern era', but its undercurrent of painful loss and compulsive grief avoidance is precisely missing from movies like 'Desk Set' and 'Adam's Rib'.

Ride with the Devil is essentially two films in one. The first is a story of loyalty - to family, community, and nation - tested in the social and political upheavals of civil war. The second is a story of male bonding and love in a homosocial order, the negotiation of male-male desire, and male domestication, all triangulated and enabled through the body of a woman.

A car drives through a bridge and dark city streets, passing the freeway sign 'East Bay Bridge, Oakland' on the way. A blasting hip-hop soundtrack accompanies opening film credits in overlapping English and Chinese characters.